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Most recently, the company has developed several projects, assisting clients in fulfilling their training requirements while aligning their training program with their business objectives.

Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals

Portico's custom e-learning courseware provided the department with a powerful tool in its effort to rapidly and effectively train a statewide workforce to meet a challenging Federal mandate. In fact, half the target population was trained within the first 30 days.

Client Profile:
The Department of Health and Hospitals is Louisiana's largest state department, with more than 12,000 employees. Its mission is to protect and promote health and to ensure access to medical, preventive, and rehabilitative services for all citizens of the State of Louisiana.

Executive Summary:
In order to meet compliance requirements for new Federal legislation DHH needed to quickly train its entire workforce dispersed throughout every Louisiana parish. A web-based training program from Portico provided a rapidly implemented, cost-effective solution.

Objective:
HIPAA - the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 - is the largest government healthcare initiative since Medicare. This federal legislation protects health-related data, ensures privacy, and improves efficiency throughout the nation's healthcare system .The Privacy Rule became effective in 2003. Failure to comply with the Privacy Rule or other HIPAA standards can result in Federal penalties.

Delivering HIPAA training to the workforce for regulatory compliance is a mandatory and complicated process. DHH recognized the need for a platform that could quickly deliver high quality cost-effective training to more than 12,000 personnel throughout Louisiana, including not only employees, but also members of the larger workforce, such as interns and volunteers.

Solution:
DHH purchased the Portico product from among numerous national competitors. Portico promptly made a number of modifications to its off-the-shelf HIPAA custom e-learning courseware to meet the organization's exact training needs for the vast majority of its workforce. Portico's custom e-learning courseware and CareerMap™ Learning Management System were key components in DHH's solution to meet the rigorous training requirements of the new HIPAA regulations.

Web-based training dramatically reduces the costs and scheduling difficulties associated with traditional instructor-led training. It allows personnel to be trained wherever they are throughout the department's enterprise, at a time that best integrates with their normal responsibilities. This approach provides a significant reduction in total workforce training time.

Results:
With the assistance of Portico's web-based training, DHH was able to rapidly train a workforce that was scattered across the state, with dramatically different work schedules. In fact, over half the target population completed training within the first month.

Portico's CareerMap™ Learning Management System allowed the department to rapidly and efficiently roll out the training programs to all selected employees statewide. While training for most of the workforce was accomplished with a web-based platform, there were some locations where Internet delivery was impractical. For those employees, Portico developed paper and CD versions of the course that could be integrated with the CareerMap™ Learning Management System event management tracking system.

Additionally, DHH prepared an instructor-led course covering its HIPAA privacy policies and procedures in detail. CareerMap™ Learning Management System enabled record-keeping information from instructor-led events to be seamlessly integrated into the comprehensive training data reporting function. This reporting function gives the department the ability to track and maintain important training data needed to document compliance with the regulation. Through CareerMap™ Learning Management System, Portico provides complete online management of all training administration and reports. Portico also supplies an annual closeout package in an electronic format that captures all existing training records.

Steve Gerhart, Director of Training for DHH, noted that due to the urgent need to complete the training, DHH had to feel confident about the technology's ability to function within the department's existing infrastructure.

Portico had already demonstrated the adaptability and reliability of CareerMap™ Learning Management System and Portico custom e-learning courseware by effectively delivering an ongoing web-based training program for the department for over a year.